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Successful Native Advertising: Disrupting the UX the Right Way

April 10, 2014

If you’re disrupting digital user experiences with irrelevant advertisements, you probably are not achieving positive brand engagement with your existing and potential customers. Negative ad disruption interrupts a user’s flow of thought, most often when the ad content is not relevant to the user. Negative ad disruptions leave potential customers with meaningless experiences and bad impressions of the advertised brand.

So how can marketers “disrupt” with messages that leave a positive impression?

The answer lies in creating successful native advertising. Content marketing provides an interesting solution for marketers who want to deliver a brand message that adds value to the user experience while also achieving positive ROI.

Successful native advertising provides value and functionality to the users who experience it. After all, a main goal for any digital marketer is to generate campaign engagement. There are many platforms offering communities of consumers for advertisers to tap into. However, creating successful native advertising platforms is no easy task.

Advertisers should search for platforms that provide a utility to shoppers. This could be as simple as enabling social share functions or connecting the content of an ad to a local map to the nearest store where they can purchase the item. After identifying communities that can support successful native advertising, the next step is to seamlessly integrate advertising content with that user experience.

Keep in mind, no one brand or store crafts and seamlessly integrates campaigns the exact same way. Campaigns must be customized depending upon the advertisers goals, product, or CRM program in order to achieve a high ROI. A company that pays to feature a list of brand-relevant content on Buzzfeed may not be the same company that sponsors an advertorial in The Atlantic.

However, there are three characteristics for successful native ads all marketers should know. They are:

Including customized calls to action

Strategically placing ads for seamless integration into the the user experience

Personalizing messages to relate directly to the consumer

Imagine a shopper who peruses the grocery store circular every Sunday night to find deals and plan her shopping trip. As she flips through her digital weekly circular, she notices there is an advertised recipe for 15 minute chicken bake from Kraft. At this point, the promoted recipe is no longer just an advertisement because it provides value to the complete shopping experience. The user views the recipe, adds the various ingredients to her shopping list, and saves 30 minutes of her time thanks to Kraft.

In this example, the call to action is to add items to a shopping list. It is strategically placed in a local circular where it is relevant to the user experience. And the personalized messages are the products our shopper was already hoping to purchase at her local supermarket, but able to connect to in a more meaningful way.

If an advertisement is truly native and organic to the user experience, consumers will jump at the chance to engage with it. Through native advertising, brands and retailers are able to deliver value added, actionable content that drives results. Successful native advertising means no longer interrupting users when ads “disrupt” their user experience.